English

IncDSI: Incrementally Updatable Document Retrieval

Information Retrieval 2024-08-20 v2 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Differentiable Search Index is a recently proposed paradigm for document retrieval, that encodes information about a corpus of documents within the parameters of a neural network and directly maps queries to corresponding documents. These models have achieved state-of-the-art performances for document retrieval across many benchmarks. These kinds of models have a significant limitation: it is not easy to add new documents after a model is trained. We propose IncDSI, a method to add documents in real time (about 20-50ms per document), without retraining the model on the entire dataset (or even parts thereof). Instead we formulate the addition of documents as a constrained optimization problem that makes minimal changes to the network parameters. Although orders of magnitude faster, our approach is competitive with re-training the model on the whole dataset and enables the development of document retrieval systems that can be updated with new information in real-time. Our code for IncDSI is available at https://github.com/varshakishore/IncDSI.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.10323,
  title  = {IncDSI: Incrementally Updatable Document Retrieval},
  author = {Varsha Kishore and Chao Wan and Justin Lovelace and Yoav Artzi and Kilian Q. Weinberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.10323},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:35:09.670Z